Eduard Bagritsky and The Odessa Review

bdralyuk

1 year ago

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The Odessa Review has been as generous to me as Benya Krik was to the guests at his sister’s wedding! This past July the journal’s multitalented Senior Editor, Katya Michaels, invited me to talk about Babel, Odessa, and my approach to translation. I babbled and babbled, then Katya picked through the wreckage and assembled a proper interview.

In it I mention the poet Eduard Bagritsky (1895-1934), who is as close to Odessa’s heart as Babel himself. And the two were great friends. Here is how Babel described Bagritsky: “He’s just like his poems… He loves the sea, a sailor’s salty speech, and a fisherman’s boat on the horizon.”

Below is one of Bagritsky’s earliest poems, in the “futurist” manner (boy, is it ever mannered!), published under a female pseudonym — Nina Voskresenskaya — in an Odessan anthology titled Automobile in the Clouds (Avto v oblakakh, 1915). In it, the young poet marvels at the strange aspect of Odessa’s beloved pedestrian walkway, Deribasovskaya Street (Rue Déribas), after sundown.

Deribasovskaya at Night

(Spring)

Across the dirty sky, words etched with rays
of greenish light: “Chocolate and Cocoa.”
And cars, like cats with trampled tails,
wail frantically: “Meow! Meow!”

Black trees, like scraggly brooms,
have swept the rouged stars from the sky,
and red-haired, loud-mouthed trams
creep over cobble-skulls — done for the night.

Dolphins of granite, looking like fat pugs,
drink from a grimy fountain’s spout,
while Pushkin’s statue reaches for a smoke
and asks a lantern: “Have you got a light?”